We knew some of these changes were coming. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, had already announced that Ubuntu would be moving from OpenOffice to LibreOffice for its default office suite. At this point, LibreOffice is 99.9% identical to OpenOffice. By the time Ubuntu 11.04 is released in April, LibreOffice is expected to have improved performance and increased interoperability with Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 formats.

Some people had expected to see Ubuntu switch from Evolution to Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mail. That did not happen. Although many dislike Evolution — I’ve never understood this myself since I like Evolution’s do-it-all functionality — it was decided that Thunderbird simply wasn’t ready yet.

If you want a better, full-featured e-mail client in Ubuntu, my suggestion is to start working on cleaning up Evolution. I don’t see Thunderbird taking its place.

The most controversial change, other the switch to Unity for the main interface, is that Ubuntu is changing its default music player from Rhythmbox to Banshee. Personally, I welcome this move. Banshee is my favorite Linux music application. As I said when it was first introduced in 2006, Banshee is as close as you can get to an iTunes for Linux. I still think that’s true.

In any case, if you really can’t stand Banshee, Unity, or LibreOffice in the forthcoming Ubuntu, you’ll still be able to switch back to Rhythmbox, pure GNOME and/or OpenOffice. Personally, I’m looking forward to Canonical’s new take on the Linux desktop, but if you can’t stand it, you can have your desktop your way. After all one of Linux’s beauties is that you can always set it up just the want you want, not how someone else wants it to be.